I've been asked to create a macro to update a few hundred or so Visio drawings, and keep them updated.
The update involves putting all objects of a certain type on their own layer - simple.
Now, this is easy enough to do, but when a user adds a new object some time in the future it will likely be on a default layer. So I had hoped to be able to include a VBA macro which is triggered by the Save event to re-assign objects to their layers.
The problem here is that I'd need to include this macro in every document since Visio doesn't have an application level VBA project.
Is there any way to introduce a VBA project to ALL Visio documents using code (VBA or otherwise)?? Or is there an alternative I might not have considered? Unfortunately an Add-in is not really an option due to available resources.
You have a couple options here:
Force every user to allow programmatic access to the VBA project for their documents, and use VBA automation to add code. This works nicely when you have programmatic access, but this can be difficult to assure.
If you're not using Visio 2013, you can actually save a document as VDX (xml) and replace the data for the VBA project with your own (you'd save out a document as VDX manually, and copy out the chunk of data for the VBA project). As I said, this wouldn't work with Visio 2013 since they seem to have eliminated the VDX format. You probably can get away with something similar with the VSDX XML format for 2013.
You can 'migrate' everyone's documents to a new VST file you provide. This would just involve copying and pasting all the content from a document into the new document that has your code in it. You have to be careful though to make sure all the document- and page-level data comes along, too (meaning DocumentSheet and PageSheet and any Document XML properties that may be important, and attributes like Author, Description, etc...)
Item 1 is the easiest, aside from the pain getting programmatic access to VBA Projects, unless you can have people send you documents to migrate.
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I began writing a docx document to do a project of mine.
Recently, I realized that it would be easier to manage that data if it was in a database.
So, I wanted to import that data into MS Access automatically, to avoid copying and pasting the data manually.
Is there anyway to do it? I have only encontered ways of opening Word application via Access. I also know that docx has a XML structure, so I imagine if I can open that structure, it would be easy to do a parser in VBA
There are two basic ways information can be taken out of a Word document and put into an Access database: automating the Word object model using VBA code running in either Word or Access OR extracting the WordOpenXML that makes up the Word document. You indicate you lean towards the second option.
Here, again, there are a number of approaches available:
Use VBA in Word or Access to extract the WordOpenXML of the document open in the Word application user interface.
Use VBA in Access together with non-VBA tools to "crack open" the Zip file and extract the XML.
Use the tools available in the .NET Framework to extract the content of the ZIP file and write it to Access using an OLE DB connection.
I understand your goal is to be able to recreate the document at a later point for printing, so you want to preserve all the formatting. In addition, you want to be able to read the content from within Access.
I believe this will require a minimum of four fields in the Access table:
ID
Title
Text of song
The complete WordOpenXML for re-creating the document
You don't mention (4) in the discussion and problem description, but if you want to store the formatting AND you want to be able to read the content I believe this is necessary. While WordOpenXML is "readable", there's a lot of mark-up in there which doesn't make reading comfortable.
All things being equal, I'd go for either VBA working on the open Word document or the .NET approach, using the Open XML SDK (free download .NET library you can reference in Visual Studio and distribute with solutions).
One important thing to keep in mind is storing the Word Open XML in the database. Unless something has changed in Access, you can't store the ZIP file - you need a "streamable" format. That would be the OOXML OPC flat-file format.
When you read the WordOpenXML from a document using VBA, that's what you get, which is why that would be an option for me. The Open XML SDK doesn't have that option, but there is code available from Eric White's blog for doing this.
When you later want to recreate and print the document it should be enough to stream the WordOpenXML to a file with the .xml extension. Or you could convert it back to a docx zip file (same blog).
Just like Visual Studio allows us to drag our favourite code to toolbox and then use it later in any project. Do VBA allows this kind of functionality by any chance.?
What is the best way to manage the favourtie/reptitive vba code which i can use it in multiple workbooks?
In Excel you can possibly use Personal.XLSB file which could be a kind of container for all subroutines which you refer to quite often. You can create and organise them in modules, class modules. Some UserForms can be placed there as well. Each time you open Excel Personal.XLSB would be the first opened workbook then.
How to create 'Personal.XLSB' if you don't have it? Go to excel, start recording macro but before you press OK choose something like 'Personal Macro Workbook' on the second list. Do not forget to save it each time you leave Excel to keep all changes in your code.
VBA doesn't have a similar feature, no.
You can export your classes and modules to standalone files, and import them into other VBA projects. And some apps, such as Microsoft Word, have features to share macros between documents, in the case of Word by attaching those macros to the Normal template. But there is no feature to reuse small snippets of code.
Have a look at MZTools ... there are versions for VB of various flavors, and for VBA. I'm not sure if it's suitable for handling huge numbers of code snippets but for smallish amounts it should be fine. It's free and has dozens of other hugely useful features.
The managing director at our company wants me to produce an automated monthly document that saves to a certain place on our system so that he doesn't have to manually input all of the data. I have set up so that the document can save to the correct place in the correct format but my knowledge of VBA is not great.
Tackling this from a 1 question at a time point of view I suppose my question would be is it possible to create 1 very long macro that will accomplish many different tasks over several workbooks. For example we have a report that comes from our ERP (Baan) and shoves all of the data into one cell. Is it possible to create a macro that will accomplish formatting text to columns, then copy data from a cell based on a row reference and then take said data and paste it in to a different workbook? Would it then be able to save the workbook all from just running one macro and if so how long will all of that take once the macro is executed?
Yes I believe this should be do-able, keeping in mind that the file names + location remain the same (otherwise you'll have to edit each month). Create different Subs/Functions and call them in one main macro.
The easiest way is probably to do it step by step. Record macro's and see whether that already helps you out and if not use google & stackoverflow for help! :)
it is entirely possible - but in my Opinion VBA is not well suited to the task. The editor is atrocius at best and it is easy to produce highly specific "spaghetti code".
File operatione are possible, but are not nice. Error handling is 80s style with lots of goto.
So if you want to build something maintainable, build an external Application using Interop or epplus (.net package for reading /writing to excel documents) or an .net addin for office.
What is the best way to avoid duplicating code when working in VBA?
I'm used to languages where I can just add an import statement and get access to all a class's public properties and functions, so I can just create a utility class with some common functions and have access to that in any project I choose to import it to. Any time I want to update one of those functions, one edit is all it takes to get it working across all projects.
Is there any good way to replicate this functionality in VBA?
What follows focuses on Excel but I am pretty sure the same would apply to any Office products.
The easy way is to save your reusable code as an addin (*.xla for Excel 2003, *.xlam for Excel 2007+). You then add the addin to Excel and all the spreadsheets you open will have access to the custom functions you have in your addin. If you add specific VBA code to a spreadsheet, you can add a reference to your addin and your VBA code will have access to all the public sub, function and classes of your addin.
In my organisation, we use 3 home made addins - they are stored in C:\Program Files\OrganisationName. And everybody has access to them. When an update is made, we only need to copy the new version to everybody's hard drive and restart Excel and they have the new version.
The addins contain utilities functions such as functions to:
read data from / write data to spreadsheets / files / databases.
usual data manipulation such as removing duplicates from a list
advanced statistical functions
etc.
A few drawbacks:
If you have several instances of Excel open, only one can update the addin, the other instances are in read-only mode
If Excel crashes, the auto recovery mode generally does not save the changes you made on your addin (TBC on newer versions) - there are a few tools to auto save regularly
An alternative is to develop xlls or COM libraries in VB or C# for example, but this is something I have not tried.
There are plenty of tutorials online if you need a more detailed procedure.
I need some advice on how to go about a particular issue I'm trying to build a work around for, but keep finding myself between a couple of poor options.. The application has a large collection of word doc templates. The application is to on the fly generate one of the templates and fill in the bookmarked values.
I have a few options on how to go about this...
Use the Interop Library: I pretty easily fill in an actual, templated document with the Interop library by going through and grabbing all the bookmarks and filling them in and saving the document again.
Issue: I need to be able to support version of Word from 2003-2010; version becomes a concern here... if I link against the wrong version of the Interop.Word, might it cause compatibility issues for users of older versions? I don't have much to test with here, so I'm not sure...
VBA Macro: I've actually used this method to build excel spreadsheets before; write fields to a csv, read into a new document generated from template via VBA, and ta-da, new document.
Issue: Security settings on end-user PCs are likely to be extremely strict. VBA likely to be disabled.
Is there a better way of going about this that I'm not seeing? Is the Interop version likely to be less of a big deal than I thought? Other than OfficeXML, which is a catastrophe for the documents we're using (I've looked..), is there another good possibility?
Edit: submitted early.. damn browser -_-;
VBA is usually blocked in documents and templates that are opened. But templates in the Word startup directory are allowed. I'm not sure about Word 2007 and 2010, but in Words 97 to 2003 there was a wrdstart directory that could contain templates that were loaded on startup of word. The normal.dot file was in there, and you could add your own to contain scripts, macros toolbars and other stuff.
I think this hasn't changed in essence since then, although I don't do a lot of Word development anymore, so I'm not sure.
[edit]
Yes, it still exists. In Word 2010 you'll find the setting in File -> Options -> Advanced -> File Locations (button). There is a 'Startup' setting, pointing to a directory. Templates in this folder will be loaded on startup and their macro's should be able to be executed.
Check File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings (button). There, you can specify allowed documents, and trusted location. The wrdstart directory is in there, but you can add your own.